As delicate as the Second Sight surgical procedure must be, it has to be better than implanting the transmitting electrodes directly into the brain tissue, as they have done with some earlier experiments.

Pills for GI imaging: right now they do not contain MEMS, but lots of interest in getting a MEMS gyro in there and some propulsion, so that the pill could be controlled and flown through the gut. Right now it moves by peristaltic action only. Check out Given Imaging, Olympus.

Top US universities in MEMS (IMHO): UC Berkeley, UCLA, MIT, Stanford, U Mich, Cornell, UC Santa Barbara, Georgia Tech...many others doing great work too, but their research groups are smaller and so not as prolific.

@Victer: there are no neutral orgs working on MEMS reliability issues. Each company addresses it internally, with their own teams. Accelerated life testing is very difficult, if not intractable in MEMS, because most MEMS do not have a temp-related degradation mechanism.

MEMS Ultrasound has been in active development for 15+ years - they are called "CMUTs" - Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasound Transducers. They are very promising for medical imaging, with the potential for much better image resolution than traditional PZT transducers

Microfluidics - I am not aware of proper design tools for microfluidic circuits. There are plenty of CFD tools out there: ANSYS, etc. and plenty of layout tools (Coventor, Tanner, AutoCAD), but none that I know specifically geared for microfluidic design.

Hi everyone. Lots of questions on the MEMS wireless sensors. They work just like a RFID chip - they are a passive LC circuit, and when activated by the reader, you measure a change in resonance that is calibrated to the physical phenomena of interest.

Ran - I guess its magnetic field.. not sure though,,-- the way i imagine is... trigger a sweep of frequencies outside the body..the implant resonaces at certain frequency and echoes it back.. you try to sense that echo..and find the pressure

ALISSA: Do you have information of the embedded pill that some engineering company and pharmaceutical are involved. I wonder how much MEMS are they using to measure PH as the pill travels in the digestive system.

No experience with medical sensor, but have heard about a couple of them. This bring up the same question I was asking yesterday on reliability testing of MEMS devices. Is there any organization out there working on reliability requirement for MEMS devices ? How do we do accelerate life testing (Similar to transistor) with MEMS devices ? What is the min requirement ?

It looks like most of the MEMS devices are very small. From manufacturing standpoint, they will be difficult to have a large number of wafers order for a single devices. Is any of the MEMS application cross using some of the pressure sensor design out there ? Might be using different packaging available to make it applicable for different application ?

Am a mobile tech analyst. Mostly listening in to learn about sensors, where they are and will be and what their uses are. Also, Dr. Fitzgerald is such a rockstar in this field, I take advantage of every opportunity to hear her speak.

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Industrial workplaces are governed by OSHA rules, but this isnít to say that rules are always followed. While injuries happen on production floors for a variety of reasons, of the top 10 OSHA rules that are most often ignored in industrial settings, two directly involve machine design: lockout/tagout procedures (LO/TO) and machine guarding.

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